by James Hunt
A fiery ball erupted into the night sky near the unfinished south portion of the wall, accompanied by a percussive blast that hummed through her body. The flash of light quickly dissipated after the magnificent bloom of colors, leaving only a faint burn of embers in its stead.
For a few moments, the air was quiet. No screams. No gunfire. Nothing but the silence of the night air, but the reprieve from the murderous sounds of death was short lived, as a single scream pierced her eardrums. And it wasn’t long before the screams multiplied, spreading like a virus attacking a host.
Wren walked slowly toward the sounds, the painful tones familiar. She’d heard the same pleas on the streets of Chicago during the car wreck that sent her daughter to the hospital. She’d heard them in the ER from desperate friends and families of the sick and dying. She’d heard them from her son, from her daughters, from people yearning for security. And now they were here. In a place she was told was safe. Safe.
“Mom!” Zack’s voice snapped her out of the flashback as she watched her son hop forward on his crutches from the direction of the blast site. She involuntarily dropped the pistol from her hand as she clutched him in her arms, violently clawing his back in the relief that he was alive and the rage that had caused her to worry. “Mom, they’re inside.” Zack’s pronounced Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he looked back to the source of death slithering inside the camp. “They shot two people. I don’t know how many of them there are.”
“C’mon.” Wren grabbed his collar and pulled him as fast as his crutches would keep up but screeched to a halt once she realized her hands were empty of the pistol. She hurried back to the spot where she’d dropped it. She groped the grass and dirt with her fingers, hoping to find it, but struggled in the dark. She was about to pull back when her fingertips grazed a chunk of metal, and she snatched the gun, sprinting to Zack. “Let’s go!”
Gunfire mixed with the pounding of feet and pulse as they headed for Nate’s. The community was well over one hundred strong, over two-thirds of that population adults, and from what she’d seen, unlike herself, all of them competent with a weapon. Unless they were swarmed with greater numbers and skill than their own, she didn’t think they’d be overrun, but she wasn’t going to leave her family’s fate to chance.
Nate’s house was close to the south end, where the explosion occurred, and when Wren pulled the hidden doors open in the floor and tossed Zack inside, the gunfire grew excessively worse. Doug helped Zack down. Before she shut the doors, Doug thrust his hand up to stop her. “What are you doing?” His gaze shifted between her face and the pistol in her hand.
“I don’t know how many of them are out there.” She looked to the gun and did her best to steady the light tremor in her hand. Unable to cease the shaking, she moved her hand and pistol out of view. “If they can’t be stopped, then you’ll need to take the kids back into town. But you’ll have to do it fast. If I’m not back in the next twenty minutes, you’ll know it’s bad. Follow the tunnel underneath, and it’ll take you to the garage. Take one of the cars they have stored there. You’ll have to break the lock on the key box. Don’t stop until you run out of gas.”
“Wren, you can’t—”
She slammed the doors shut and pulled the mat to cover the hidden compartment’s entrance. She stopped at the doorframe of the house as a man hurried by, wielding a shotgun. She raised her pistol and fired, her shot missing its target wide left, sending up a spray of dirt. The recoil from the gun knocked the pistol from her hand, and she dove to the floor after it, ducking out of the way of the shotgun blast that sprayed a cluster of lead balls through the wood.
Wren reached for the pistol’s barrel, burning her fingertips as she mistakenly grabbed the searing barrel. She cursed and fumbled the gun in her hands. Her body trembled with adrenaline. She huddled close to the doorframe on the inside of the cabin and slowly poked her head around the corner, only to duck back behind it at the sight of the twelve-gauge staring her down.
The blast splintered the doorframe as Wren rolled to her right, the slivers of wood from the door falling off her shoulders. She aimed the pistol toward the door, both hands on the grip this time and her finger on the trigger. She saw the man take a quick step inside, and she squeezed, the recoil jolting her arms and shoulders, but the pistol remained in her palms.
Bullets redecorated the inside of Nathan’s house, and while she emptied the clip, missing her target, the shots were enough to send the intruder running. But even after the clip had been emptied and the intruder was gone, Wren continued to squeeze the trigger. Click, click, click. The hammer knocked against the firing pin until the weight of the pistol grew too heavy to keep lifted, and the pistol thudded against the floor as it fell from her hand.
Wren couldn’t tell how much time had passed while she was on the floor, but after a while, the gunfire outside ended. Then, Doug, Zack, and the girls were standing above her, looking at her as though she were a ghost, feeling as cold as one.
But it was Nathan who helped her up, his shirt sweaty and stained with blood and dirt. “C’mon, Wren. You’re okay.” She watched him pick up the emptied pistol on the floor and tuck it in his belt. He set her on the couch, checked her heart rate, and flashed a light in her eyes to check her pupils. “Wren, do you know where you are?”
“I’m…” She squinted her eyes shut and forced herself back into reality. She pushed herself up from the couch, making her way to the door. “What portion of the wall was hit?” She clung to the life that was her work, and the livelihood of her mind, using it to shift her out of the chaos.
Doug remained quiet for a moment before he answered, slowly. “It was yesterday’s work. Just before the south wall.”
Wren cursed under her breath, and as if on cue, Edric appeared at the door, flanked by his personal goon squad. His face was drenched in sweat and covered with soot. His arms bulged from his shirt, and his rifle strap clung tight to his chest. “Come with me. Now.”
One of the goons grabbed her arm forcefully, and before she even had a chance to wrench herself free, she was out of the house and being marched toward the south fence, where the explosion took place. In the dark, it was difficult to see, but once she was close enough, she managed to make out a lumped shape in the middle of the grass. And the body wasn’t alone.
Wren passed dozens of fallen bodies, all of them sprawled out in the dark grass, their limbs twisted awkwardly where they fell, their clothes and the ground around them stained with a dark liquid she knew could only be blood.
Edric’s goons brought her to the site of the blast, where only bits and pieces of the fence remained. An entire section at least ten feet wide had been blown apart, leaving nothing but a crater in its wake. To the left of the crater, there was a group of people on their knees, their hands tied behind their backs and guns aimed at the back of their skulls. Edric walked over to the first captive within reach and yanked his face up so Wren could get a good look. “You know who this is?” He thrust the man’s head down forcefully, the scars on his face twisted in what light the lanterns offered. “I ask because it seems to me that these people had some inside information. Attacking a portion of the fence that you rebuilt.” He turned around to the gathering crowd, the stench of fear and anger thick in the air. “After all,” he said, raising his voice, “you said that nothing would break through your designs. You said you could keep us safe. You call this safe?”
“The walls were meant to withstand scaling, gunfire, and battery,” Wren said. “We don’t have the materials to build something to withstand a bomb.”
“You said you could do anything,” Edric said, throwing her own words back in her face. “You said that you would do whatever it took to make sure that our families were protected.” Edric pointed to one of the bodies on the ground. “What about Steve’s family? Are they safer now that he’s dead?” He walked to another body, this one face up, with blood still leaking from the hole in her head. “Or how about Martha’s children? Her husban
d died years ago, and now she has two sons who are parentless. They’re nine and twelve. Are they supposed to look after themselves now?”
The dissent in the crowd fed off of Edric’s words, every one of them growing hungrier, angrier, the pain in their veins clamoring to escape, begging to punish someone. Wren looked at each of the fallen in turn, doing her best to not fall into the trap of words that Edric was hoping she’d slip into. “Everything I have done, everything the team I was charged with have tried to accomplish, has been for the good of this community, for everyone.”
“Has it?” Edric asked, looking down at her then back to the line of captives on the ground. “And you said you would do everything you could to protect not just your family, but everyone’s?”
Wren felt the edge of the snare, the final blow Edric was seeking to deliver, but with the growing crowd around her and its palpable anger, her options were slim. “Whatever I can do to help.” She spit the words out reluctantly, trying her best to keep her voice calm.
“Good.” Edric stomped over to the farthest captive and wrenched him up by the collar, dragging him to Wren’s feet, where he rolled onto his side. Edric removed his rifle from his shoulder and extended it to Wren. “Shoot him.”
Wren looked down at the captive. He was a boy, no older than Zack. The whites of his eyes were prominent in the darkness, the rest of his face dirty. She took a step back, shaking her head. “He’s a kid.”
“A kid who shot and killed one of our own. A kid who orphaned children. A kid who meant to take what we have and kill anyone who stood in his way.” Edric thrust the rifle into her arms, forcing her to grab it, then stepped around her, positioning the rifle under the crook of her arm and aiming the barrel at the boy’s head, then whispered in her ear, “A kid who sought to kill your family.” He stepped away, leaving Wren with the gun pointed at the captive. “Well? You want to protect this community? Here’s your chance.”
Wren watched the others, looking everywhere except the face of the boy on the ground. “This isn’t who we are,” she said, the strength in her voice surprising her. “We don’t murder children. We don’t kill in cold blood.”
“This isn’t murder!” Edric snapped back at her. “This is justice.”
“Edric, enough!” Iris burst through the crowd, Nathan and Ben close behind her. “You have no right to give such an order. Any sentencing must be done through consultation with the community and then approved through the council. You know our laws.”
“Our people don’t need laws! They need action!” Edric pulled his sidearm, aiming it at Iris’s head. “And you will bite your tongue before you try and interrupt me again.” He wavered his aim between the three of them as the rest of Edric’s goons raised their rifles. He shifted the pistol’s barrel to Wren. “Shoot him. Show us who you value more. Us. Or them.”
The boy quivered on the ground, spewing unintelligible pleas, his fellow captives glaring at her with the same look of death in their eyes as half the community around her. Wren raised the sight of the rifle to her eye, positioning her finger on the trigger, and the boy cast his head down, his shoulders shaking violently. For my family.
But the thought struck a chord. Somewhere, the boy at the end of the barrel had a mother and a father. He had once been a child like Addison and Chloe. She looked to the other captives tied up on the ground. All of them have family. All of them were someone. Wren lowered the rifle.
Edric flicked the safety off his weapon and took a step forward, shortening the space between the tip of his pistol and Wren by half. “Shoot him.”
Wren tossed the rifle on the ground. “No.”
The scars on Edric’s face twisted in the same rage she’d seen before, and her eyes wandered quickly over the faces in the dark and the flickering light of the lanterns to see their reactions, and the expressions were mixed. “You pick these people over the community that took you in? The community that gave you food and water? Who helped keep your husband and children alive?” Edric shook his head. “Now we know where your loyalties reside.” He tilted the gun down at the boy’s head and squeezed the trigger, spraying his blood across Wren’s legs.
Chapter 8
It was abnormally cold just before the sun broke over the horizon. Goose bumps rose on Wren’s arm as she sat on the front steps of Nathan’s porch, alone except for the nearly empty bottle of whiskey to her left. She’d found it in the cellar where Addison, Chloe, Zack, and Doug were hidden. She didn’t remember much of returning to the cabin, but the gunshots from Edric’s pistol still rang as clearly as they had nearly ten hours ago.
Wren curled her fingers around the bottle’s neck and lifted the rim to her lips, the brown liquid sloshing back and forth inside then sliding down her throat. The whiskey’s burn had numbed her senses and slowed her mind. But the one thing it hadn’t done was blur the vision of the young man who was killed at her feet, nor the screams from the fellow captives right before Edric’s men silenced them as well.
Murderers. They came here to kill your family. But even as Wren repeated the mantra that Edric had used to justify the deaths of the captives, she couldn’t rid herself of the trembling boy at her feet, his eyes wide with fear just moments before his death. There was no trial, no talk of their reasons, no explanation of who shot first. Justice. That wasn’t justice. It was revenge.
Wren circled the rim of the whiskey bottle with her finger, the glass warm from the heat of her lips. If there was one thing that came out of the altercation from the night before, it was Edric making a point of who was really in charge of the community. While he was gunning down the enemy, Iris and Ben were held to little more than a few words before Edric disappeared with his goons.
A shudder ran through her at the thought of his little army, his disciples that he’d trained so well. They’d listen to anything he said and would follow through with anything they told him. The only question was how much of the rest of the community would? Her wall failed, the people in the community saw her refuse an order from a man they either feared or respected, or both. Whatever little headway she’d made disappeared the moment she lowered her weapon.
A part of her wanted to do it. That much she was sure of, or else the shame from last night would have worn off hours ago, before the bottle between her knees was drained. She’d tried to find a way to justify killing the boy, but no matter what excuse she set in front of herself, she came back to the same conclusion: all those people wanted was help. They asked for it before, and we turned them away. We never even considered working with them.
The community’s policy of isolation was one that was well accepted, and if it weren’t for Nathan, she and her family would have been in the same boat. She thought about everything she did to keep her family safe back in Chicago, never stopping to think about the repercussions. That’s all they did. They were just trying to stay alive.
The first rays of daylight broke through the trees, and Wren squinted into the early sunrise. She grabbed the bottle lazily and pushed herself off the porch, but before she was able to stand fully, she collapsed backward, the world spinning with her. She lay on her back, the wooden planks lumpy and stiff underneath, and rested her head on the porch, her mind wavering back and forth like a ship caught in a storm at sea.
She chuckled, the booze flooding her senses. She hadn’t felt this drunk since high school. She shimmied to her side, pressing her palms flat against the wooden planks, and used her two shaky arms to push up from the floor. She used the porch railing for support and stood still for a few moments once she finally straightened.
Her first step forward was misplaced, and she caught herself on the doorframe just before she fell, her fingers cutting into the grooves of the bullet holes. The worries and pain that had plagued her mind the entire night were immediately washed away and replaced with the dizzy sensation that accompanied draining a fifth of whiskey. She made her way to the only piece of furniture in the living room, which was the dining table, and sat awkwardly on the edge of
one of the chairs, avoiding the bedroom and risking waking up the kids in her drunken stupor.
She rested her elbows on the table and cradled her face with both hands, trying to steady herself and the room swirling around her. Carefully, she laid her face down on the table, the wood cool against her flushed cheek, and the world went black. When she felt a nudge on her shoulder, she grunted, and when the intrusion refused to relinquish its assault, she knocked it away with her hand, only to have it return with greater force.
“Wren, wake up.”
A sudden wave of heat washed over her, and she lifted her cheek from the table, the skin peeling off like Velcro. Her body was covered in sweat, and she smelled the booze squeezing through her pores. She wiped her face. The flavor in her mouth was something akin to what she expected a rotten animal to taste like. The window on the far side of the room showed the day had gone well into the afternoon, which jolted her awake. “Christ.” Wren jumped from her chair, wobbling on two legs toward the front door, where she was forced to stop and catch her breath. Whatever aches plagued her body failed in comparison to the pounding in her head. Her brain throbbed against her skull with such a force she slid back down to the floor, pressing her palm into her forehead as if she could press the hammering into submission.
“Are you all right?”
She felt hands on her, warm, thin hands, yet oddly familiar. She shook her head, her eyes still squinted shut. “I feel like was hit by a freight train.”
“Whiskey never agreed with you.”
Wren opened her eyes and saw Doug kneeling down beside her, his crutches on the floor. Despite the hangover, her rage sifted through the impaired thoughts and memories that clung tightly to their last encounter. “Whiskey wasn’t the only one.” She rolled to her left, using the doorframe to climb back to her feet, while Doug remained on the floor. “Why didn’t anyone wake me?”